


a freight train running

by ladymemebeth



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Bruce Springsteen References, Canon Lesbian Character, Driving, Lesbianism, friendship through trauma, gender feelings, in which the author projects very heavily onto the protagonist lol oops, listening to records
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 10:21:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19972462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladymemebeth/pseuds/ladymemebeth
Summary: The winter before the summer that changed everything was quiet and cold, the way most winters in Hawkins tended to be. Her cousin Sandra had given her the record without any pretense of wrapping paper—she simply chucked the album onto the foot of the bed where Robin sat and said, “Here.”





	a freight train running

**Author's Note:**

> https://youtu.be/xzQvGz6_fvA

The winter before the summer that changed everything was quiet and cold, the way most winters in Hawkins tended to be. Her cousin Sandra had given her the record without any pretense of wrapping paper—she simply chucked the album onto the foot of the bed where Robin sat and said, “Here.”

“Thanks,” said Robin, guilty that she hadn’t gotten anything for her in turn. She gingerly picked up the record and turned it over in her lap. “I dunno, this looks pretty patriotic. Not really my thing.”

“Yeah, but it’s not _really_ ,” Sandra said, rolling her eyes as she sat on the bed next to Robin. “I can’t believe you’ve never heard of Bruce _Springsteen_. I swear it takes the Midwest, like, an extra five years to catch up on popular culture. I bet you’re all still listening to the fucking Village People or whatever.” Sandra was home from her first semester at college in the Bronx, which of course made her the expert on everything cool, even if Robin knew for a fact that she still regularly called home to cry to her parents when she couldn’t figure out the subway lines.

The album art was a picture of a man wearing a white T-shirt tucked messily into a pair of blue jeans, his hips cocked slightly, backside to the camera, in front of the American flag. His left arm hung casually at his side while the right rested in the shadow of his thigh. The bill of a battered red baseball cap was stuck in one of his back pockets like a handkerchief; it reminded Robin of the hat she had worn to soccer practice in middle school, slung backwards on her head, until her mother insisted she looked too much like a boy and made her stop wearing it. Looking at the hat in this man’s back pocket made her stomach feel weird, but she forced herself to smile at her cousin anyway.

“Thanks, Sandy,” she said.

“You have to promise to give it a listen. I can’t be the only cousin with culture next Christmas. And _you_ can’t show up to college without at least a vague awareness of cool music.”

“When I start making movies, you can be the soundtrack supervisor or whatever it’s called, okay?”

Sandra grinned. “Yeah. Deal.”

A week later, once the last of the extended family had finally been coaxed out the door and her mother was finally done swearing that next year she was going to make somebody else host Christmas for once, Robin lay on the floor of her room in her dorky flannel pajamas and played the record. It had begun to snow earlier that evening, and Robin watched the flakes pile up in clumps on her windowsill as she listened to the album. It was an alright record, she decided, again looking at the cover. Her eyes traced the lines of Springsteen’s lean legs clad in denim. She knew girls thought that he was sexy, and Robin supposed she agreed: there was a full-body photograph of him on the inner record sleeve, wearing the same outfit as on the cover, and he looked straight into the camera with dark eyes against a deep blue background. She liked the cover art better, though, because it could have been anyone in those jeans and white T-shirt. The belt he wore looked a little like a belt that Robin had, and she pictured herself in those clothes, standing cockily with a defiant look on her face. She wondered if people would find her sexy like that, if people would feel the way her friends must have felt when they had squealed over the boys in _The Outsiders_ , dressed in dusty leather with cigarettes tucked behind their ears. If they would look at her the way Tammy Thompson looked at Steve Harrington in English class, her eyes soft at the edges as she laughed at whatever moronic thing he was currently doing, confident in the way that only a teenage boy could be. She envied his ease of motion, the carelessness with which he slung his arm over the back of some girl’s chair to peek at her homework. Once she thought she had wanted him, wanted any number of boys, but it was slowly becoming clear to her that what she wanted was the space they took up in the world and how easily they did it.

The last song on Side A of the record was different from the other songs, eerie almost, and it opened with a line of synthesizers and a frantic drumbeat. It sounded sort of like an echo chamber, like the music was literally surrounding her, getting closer. “Hey, little girl, is your daddy home?” began the lyrics, which Robin admitted was pretty gross, but she kept listening:

> _ I’ve got a bad desire _
> 
> _ Oh, I’m on fire _

That weird feeling in her stomach had crept back in full. She lay rapt on the floor, staring straight up at the ceiling.

> _Tell me, now, baby, is he good to you?_
> 
> _ And can he do to you the things that I do? _
> 
> _ I can take you higher _
> 
> _ Oh, I’m on fire _

Only once had Tammy ever truly acknowledged Robin, and it embarrassed her as much as it thrilled her to remember how she had grabbed Robin’s arm outside of class one day right before winter break. “Thanks for saving my ass,” she had said, referring to Robin’s hastily-provided answer when Click had called on the oblivious Tammy earlier in class. Her nails were painted a pale blue and her fingertips were firm but soft against the inside of Robin’s wrist. Robin’s egg blue, she remembered later, and had immediately wanted to die for thinking something so unbelievably embarrassing.

“Mmyghugh’re welcome?” Robin had finally managed to say after what felt like maybe the longest two seconds of her whole life.

“See you around!” Tammy had said brightly. She spun on the heel of her blindingly white Ked and dashed off after the group of popular boys from class, calling out, “Steve! Wait up!” Robin watched as the dark curls of her ponytail bounced and caught the light of the ugly overhead fluorescents. It was then, touching the inside of her wrist where Tammy’s fingers had pressed into her skin, that she knew she was so, so fucked. 

> _ At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet _
> 
> _ And a freight train running through the middle of my head _
> 
> _ Only you can cool my desire _
> 
> _ Oh, I’m on fire _

Robin listened as the song faded out, the strains of Bruce’s mournful vocalizations melting into the synths and then disappearing altogether. The window had frosted over entirely during the storm. In the darkness of her room, Robin could almost pretend she was the only person left on Earth. She turned off the stereo and crawled into bed. She would listen to the rest of the album tomorrow.

* * *

The winter after the summer that changed everything was surprisingly warm—it didn’t snow at all until early January, the first snowflakes drifting to the ground as Robin shut the door behind her one Tuesday morning. She was already late for her shift at Family Video, but she stopped for a moment to stare up at the sky. She knew Steve would be waiting for her, probably annoyed that he was stuck alone with Keith and his droning rants about the latest _Rocky_ movie. Steve was a friend, she supposed, sweet like a dog and stupid like one, too, but she meant it in the nicest way possible. He still had a scar over his eye where the Russian soldier had struck him—he liked to come up with different explanations for the mark when he was talking to female customers _: I fell out of a tree after saving both a kitten_ ** _and_** _a baby that were stuck up there, I swear to God._ Sometimes she joined in to vouch for him, just to see the bemused smiles on the women’s faces: _The fire department was so impressed. They wanted to hire him on the spot, said they needed strong men like Steve, but he said, Gentlemen, I am committed to the life of a video store salesman._

Usually she drove Steve home from work, and she would allow him to rifle through the pile of cassettes on the floor— he loved Sting and The Police and, weirdly, Culture Club. Today he shoved “Born in the USA” into the cassette player without her noticing as she pulled out of the parking lot of Family Video. She practically jumped when the title song began to play.

“What, you don’t like Bruce?” he asked. “Come on. He’s the Boss!”

“No, I love him. I mean, I love this album,” she said. “My favorite song is ‘I’m on Fire,’ do you know that one?”

Steve shrugged. “I mean, I’m not, like, his biggest fan or anything. But I would probably recognize it.”

When they pulled into Steve’s driveway, Robin leaned over and fast-forwarded the tape through a couple songs until it hit the sixth track. She sat back against the crumbling leather carseat and closed her eyes, but she opened them a moment later to see if Steve was listening. His brow was furrowed as he stared into the middle distance of his own driveway, like he was concentrating, straining his ears as if to hear some secret code. Robin hid a smile behind her mittened hand because she knew he was trying to understand, the way he had tried to understand when she told him about Tammy Thompson on the sticky bathroom floor of the Starcourt Mall. He couldn’t understand—she knew that—but she appreciated that he tried. She wasn’t going to give him a medal or anything, but still.

Showing Steve the song was almost more terrifying than actually telling him she was gay, because that was a statement of fact and this was a sort of shot in the dark—she couldn’t make his heart stop at the sound of those synthesizers the way hers now automatically did. She wanted to say, Doesn’t this make you ache? Haven’t you ever been so full of want it almost killed you? She cringed at the pretentiousness of those thoughts, how much she sounded like Sandra pretending to be profound, but she didn’t know how else to describe the song except for some bodily pain. Not quite a black eye, but something close to it. She thought about Nancy Wheeler and almost asked, but she didn’t, because for all the time they spent together at work and the strange intimacies they had shared over the summer, Robin and Steve did not have conversations like that. Just the once, which, if she was being honest, was enough. Steve couldn’t understand the song either, not in the way that she listened to it, but maybe he could hear something else. A different translation. 

She stopped the tape right as the song ended, not wanting to spoil the moment. They sat in silence in her car for a while until their breaths became visible in the coldness of the encroaching evening. It had snowed all day. It looked like it was going to stick.

“That’s a pretty good song,” Steve said finally. He turned to look at her, a faint grin on his face. “You had a crazy look on your face the whole time. Not crazy-bad,” he added. “Crazy-good. I dunno. It’s a good song,” he repeated. “Maybe I’ll buy the tape.”

“You owe so much to me, dude: your music taste, your job at Family Video, that girl’s number you got today…Probably your life, if you want to count the shit from this summer.” 

Steve rolled his eyes as he climbed out of the car. “Yeah, yeah. Thank you, O Sapphic Goddess, for all that you do. Whatever. I’ll see you on Thursday.” He waved through the window before sullenly proceeding through the rising piles of snow towards his front door.

Robin drove home in silence. She liked the way snow made things quiet, how you could wake up on the morning after a snowstorm and pretend the whole world was new, untouched. The illusion was lost in her own driveway where her father had already shoveled and left footprints leading to the doorway.

She stepped out of her car and again looked up at the sky the way she had earlier that day, squinting against the descending flakes. She wanted to make some connection between the snow and being on fire, the contradictions there, but she struggled to find the words. She wasn’t entirely sure that words were even necessary. She knew things were not going to get easier: she read the news and she had witnessed death and there were parts of both the world and herself with which she was still desperately unfamiliar. But in the snow things were simple, the way a song is simple: two minutes and then nothing except for the feeling that remained, like a bruise, soft to the touch.

**Author's Note:**

> this was very much inspired by an essay by natalie adler that talks about bruce springsteen's androgynous lesbianic intrigue: https://electricliterature.com/my-butch-lesbian-mom-bruce-springsteen/
> 
> (i don't identify as butch and i don't headcanon robin as such either but i think this is still reflective of how many lesbians feel wrt to their identity. at least i hope so, for my own sake. lmao.)
> 
> [i'm on tumblr.](https://holdoncallfailed.tumblr.com/)


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